Solid state drives (SSDs) are a type of mass storage device that share a similar footprint with (and provide similar functionality as) traditional magnetic-based hard disk drives (HDDs). Notably, standard SSDs—which utilize “flash” memory—can provide various advantages over standard HDDs, such as considerably faster Input/Output (I/O) performance. For example, average I/O latency speeds provided by SSDs typically outperform those of HDDs because the I/O latency speeds of SSDs are less-affected when data is fragmented across the memory sectors of SSDs. This occurs because HDDs include a read head component that must be relocated each time data is read/written, which produces a latency bottleneck as the average contiguity of written data is reduced over time. Moreover, when fragmentation occurs within HDDs, it becomes necessary to perform resource-expensive defragmentation operations to improve or restore performance. In contrast, SSDs, which are not bridled by read head components, can largely maintain I/O performance even as data fragmentation levels increase. SSDs also provide the benefit of increased impact tolerance (as there are no moving parts), and, in general, virtually limitless form factor potential. These advantages—combined with the increased availability of SSDs at consumer-affordable prices—make SSDs a preferable choice for mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smart phones.
Despite the foregoing benefits provided by SSDs, some drawbacks remain that have yet to be addressed, especially with respect to establishing redundancy-based protection within SSDs. For example, conventional techniques for implementing redundancy-based protection within a given SSD involve writing data (e.g., a user file) across different dies of the SSD, and interleaving parity information for the data within the data itself across the different dies. Unfortunately, this approach establishes a pitfall in which the data becomes unrecoverable when a single die of SSD fails, which is not uncommon. In particular, a single die failure often leads to the loss of both data and its corresponding parity data, thereby thwarting potential recovery scenarios. Notably, the conventional approaches that attempt to alleviate this problem typically come at the cost of significant performance/flexibility reduction and increased storage space consumption, which is undesirable for obvious reasons. Therefore, there exists a need for a technique for improving the overall redundancy-based protection characteristics of a given SSD without requiring significant performance and storage space sacrifices.